Search Worlds Without End

This novelette originally appeared in the anthology Old Venus (2015), edited by Gardner Dozois and George R. R. Martin. It can also be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 1 (2016), edited by Neil Clarke, and The Year's Best Military & Adventure SF 2015 (2016), edited by David Afsharirad. The story is included in the collection Insistence of Vision (2016).

Read the full story for free at the author's website.

Once More Into The Abyss by Dennis Danvers is the last of three novelettes about Stan, whose parents claimed to be aliens and either perished or went home via an abyss in the middle of New Mexico. Stan is drawn back to the Abyss when his wife is offered a job there studying alien artifacts. So Stan and his family (wife, son, brother and three dogs) take a road trip.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

Orejas de ellos, the things who listen, whispered the superstitious fishermen when the strange occurrences began off the Philippine coast. How else explain the sudden disappearance of a vessel beneath a mysterious curtain of foam? The writhings of thousands of maddened fish trapped in a coffinlike area of ocean? What monsters gorged at the bottom of the Luzon Deep and what were their plans?

Radar expert Terry Holt and the crew of the Esperance had to devise a weapon against the horrifying creatures which threatened mankind with extinction.

Here are terror, excitement, and the clutch of cold death as combined by a master hand in the field of science fiction.

World Fantasy Award winning, and Hugo and Nebula Award nominated short story.

Aimee has bought a travelling monkey show, wherein 26 monkeys do a variety of tricks and then vanish. She tries to figure out how the vanishing happens.

This story originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, July 2008. It can also be found in the anthologies:

• The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Three (2009), edited by Jonathan Strahan
• Year's Best Fantasy 9 (2009), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Kramer
• The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2009 (2009), edited by Rich Horton
• The Hugo Award Showcase: 2010 Volume (2009), edited by Mary Robinette Kowal
• The Secret History of Fantasy (2010), edited by Peter S. Beagle
• Circus: Fantasy Under the Big Top (2012), edited by Ekaterina Sedia

It is included At the Mouth of the River of Bees (2012).

Read the full story for free on the author's website.

The novel concerns American mining engineer Nicholas Graydon. While searching for lost Inca treasure in South America, he encounters Suarra, handmaiden to the Snake Mother of Yu-Atlanchi.

Nebula Award nominated novelette. First appeared at Strange Horizons where it can be read for free.

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, April 2013. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2014, edited by Rich Horton.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Nebula Award nominated novella. It originally appeared in the collection Abyss (1971).

A Deadly Mistake

When Kanbara Kanata is whisked away from his mundane life to a world of adventure, he inadvertently offends the all-powerful being who brought him there. As punishment, he is sent to the bottom of the most dangerous dungeon without a single special power or ability! He is sure that he's a goner until he meets a lich girl named Lunaère--an undead powerhouse who hates humans, but grudgingly decides to assist him all the same. With Lunaère's help, Kanata may just grow into someone truly incredible!

SPIDER SURPRISE!

Kanata is making his way in the wider world of Locklore, despite the lich Lunaère's warnings about its dangers. But after Lunaère's intensive training, everyone he runs into seems strangely... weak? Still, you can't be too careful, so Kanata and his new friends make their way toward the city of Manaloch to get some alchemy ingredients. But danger lurks nearby in the form of an infestation of giant spider monsters! And somewhere in the world, Lunaère is slowly making her way back to Kanata...

THE GIRL FROM EARTH

Kanata and his friends have settled temporarily in the city of Manaloch after freeing it from the clutches of demons. They're trying to create the Blood Ether of the Gods, a powerful potion that Lunaère used as a vital part of Kanata's training. But their work is interrupted when Kanata makes a surprising discovery: another transplant from Japan, the mysterious Kotone, is looking for him. Is she simply hoping to connect to someone from her home world, or does she have something more sinister in mind...?

Violet Benson used to know who she was: a dead girl's clone, with a dead girl's memories. But after Huxley's attempt to take over the government left her memories and personality wiped, all she has left is a mission: help the CCA fight back against the rest of Huxley's deadly clones that are still at large.

But when a group of clones infiltrate CCA headquarters, Violet is blamed. Already unsure of where her loyalties should lie, Violet finds herself running away with an unlikely ally: Seth, Jaxon's unpredictable foster brother. With Seth at her side, Violet begins to learn about a whole new side of her city's history--and her own.

But when she learns the shocking truth about cloning, Violet will have to make a choice--and it may be one that takes her away from everyone she ever loved.

Combine six of the finest fantasy authors working in the genre today: Mike Resnick & Brad R. Torgersen, Jay Lake, Mel Odom, J.M. McDermott, and Cat Rambo, and mix in veteran editor and New York Times best-selling author Philip Athans, and what comes out is the Fathomless Abyss: a wild new fantasy world where the laws of physics only work against you, there's no way out, and time means nothing.

This is the world of the Fathomless Abyss, a bottomless pit that opens who-knows-when onto who-knows-where, just long enough for new people from a thousand different worlds and a million different times to fall in and join the fight for survival in a place where the slightest misstep means an everlasting fall into eternity.

Tales from the Fathomless Abyss features six new short stories, and it's only the beginning. From here, each author will branch out to spin a series of new books sharing this impossible, explosive, infinite setting.

Your fall into the Fathomless Abyss begins here.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: At Play in the Fields of Wonder - essay by Ken Scholes
• The Lioness of God, Daughter of the Peaceful - shortfiction by Philip Athans
• It's Mine - shortfiction by J. M. McDermott
• The Gatherer - shortfiction by Mel Odom
• The Ascent - shortfiction by Brad R. Torgersen and Mike Resnick
• A Querulous Flute of Bone - shortfiction by Cat Rambo
• That Which Rises Ever Upward - shortstory by Jay Lake
• About the Authors (Tales from the Fathomless Abyss) - essay by uncredited

In the last days of the twenty-first century, sea creatures swim through the ruins of London. Trapped in the abyss, humankind wavers between fear and hope--fear of what lurks in the depths around them, and hope that they might one day find a way back to the surface.

When sixteen-year-old submersible racer Leyla McQueen is chosen to participate in the prestigious annual marathon, she sees an opportunity to save her father, who has been arrested on false charges. The Prime Minister promises the champion whatever their heart desires. But the race takes an unexpected turn, forcing Leyla to make an impossible choice.

Now she must brave unfathomable waters and defy a corrupt government determined to keep its secrets, all the while dealing with a guarded, hotheaded companion she never asked for in the first place. If Leyla fails to discover the truths at the heart of her world, or falls prey to her own fears, she risks capture--or worse. And her father will be lost to her forever.

Table of Contents:

• The Face in the Abyss 5
• The People of the Pit 128
• The Women of the Wood 151

FROM THE DEEPEST MINE IN TENNESSEE, ENTER THE DARKEST PIT OF HELL...

It is the deepest coal mine ever created. But when the miners dig too far, they violate the earth's most ancient and closely guarded secret.

Now blood flows from faucets, and huge thorns tear the ground apart.

Now grotesque, half-seen creatures terrorize the town, as the stench of sulfur fills the air.

Now the legions of Hell itself raise their unspeakable dominion over heaven and earth from

THE ABYSS

Neville Folliot, a 19th century explorer, goes missing and his brother Clive sets out to find him. He stumbles across "The Dungeon", a place of strange atmospheric conditions, beings from distant galaxies and hidden pockets of time.

Epic fantasy, social science fiction, heroic fantasy. allegorical fantasy.Wind from the Abyss is the third volume in Janet Morris' classic Silistra Quartet, continuing one woman's quest for self-realization in a distant tomorrow.

A blend of sorcery, high adventure and romance, this first novel in a series of two takes the wizards across the void into our own world, into the arms of the Third Reich.

For Cassandra Leung, bossing around sea monsters is just the family business. She's been a Reckoner trainer-in-training ever since she could walk, raising the giant, genetically engineered beasts to defend ships as they cross the pirate-infested NeoPacific. But when the pirate queen Santa Elena swoops in on Cas's first solo mission and snatches her from the bloodstained decks, Cas's dream of being a full-time trainer seems dead in the water.

Waiting for her on the pirate ship is an unhatched Reckoner pup. Santa Elena wants to take back the seas with a monster of her own, and she needs a proper trainer to do it. She orders Cas to raise the pup and teach him to fight for the pirates. If Cas fails, her blood will be the next to paint the sea.

Three weeks have passed since Cassandra Leung pledged her allegiance to ruthless pirate-queen Santa Elena and set free Bao, the sea monster Reckoner she'd been forced to train. The days as a pirate trainee are long and grueling, but it's not the physical pain that Cas dreads most. It's being forced to work with Swift, the pirate girl who broke her heart.

But Cas has even bigger problems when she discovers Boa is not the only a monster swimming free. Other Reckoners illegally sold to pirates have escaped their captors and are taking the NeoPacific by storm, attacking ships at random and ruining the ocean ecosystem. As a Reckoner trainer, Cas might be the only one who can stop them. But how can she take up arms against the creatures she used to care for and protect? Will Cas embrace the murky morals that life as a pirate brings or perish in the dark waters of the NeoPacific?

The exciting sequel to The Abyss Surrounds Us.

TO SAVE THEIR CIVILISATION HE MUST DESTROY IT...

When images of a lost civilization are 'dreamed' by a self-proclaimed prophet of the age, Nigel Sheldon, inventor of wormhole technology and creator of the Commonwealth society, is asked to investigate. Especially as the dreams seem to be coming from the Void - a mysterious area of living space monitored and controlled because of its hugely destructive capabilities. With it being the greatest threat to the known universe, Nigel is committed to finding out what really lies within the Void and if there's any truth to the visions they've received. Does human life really exist inside its boundary?

But when Nigel crash lands inside the Void, on a planet he didn't even know existed, he finds so much more than he expected. Bienvenido: a world populated by the ancestors of survivors from Commonwealth colony ships that disappeared centuries ago. Since then they've been fighting an increasingly desperate battle against the Fallers, a space-born predator artificially evolved to conquer worlds. Their sole purpose is to commit genocide against every species they encounter. With their powerful telepathic lure - that tempts any who stray across their path to a slow and painful death - they are by far the greatest threat to humanity's continued existence on this planet.

But Nigel soon realizes that the Fallers also hold the key to something he'd never hoped to find - the destruction of the Void itself. If only he can survive long enough to work out how to use it...

Clark Ashton Smith was one of the most remarkable and distinctive American poets of the twentieth century. His tremendous output of poetry, totaling nearly 1000 original poems written over a span of more than fifty years, is of the highest craftsmanship and runs the gamut of subject matter from breathtaking "cosmic" verse about the stars and galaxies to plangent love poetry to pungent satire to delicate imitations of Japanese haiku.

This edition prints, for the first time, Smith's entire poetic work, including hundreds of uncollected and unpublished poems. The poems have been arranged chronologically by date of writing, so far as can be ascertained. This first volume includes poetry from the first two to three decades of Smith's career, when he published such noteworthy volumes as The Star-Treader (1912), Ebony and Crystal (1922), andSandalwood (1925).

Smith's early work was written under the tutelage of the celebrated California poet George Sterling, but Smith quickly surpassed his mentor in the writing of cosmic and lyric verse. Smith's greatest poetic triumph, perhaps, was The Hashish-Eater, a poem of nearly 600 lines that strikingly evokes the myriad suns of unbounded space and the baleful monsters that may lurk therein. But Smith could also write such touching elegies as "Requiescat in Pace," a dirge for a woman whose death affected him deeply.

Somewhere in the vast expanse of space, a group of prisoners lives in permanent captivity.

The only company they have is each other and the Belters who guard them. The only stories they know are the triumphs and crimes that brought them there. The only future they see is an empty life in an enormous room.

And then the man from Mars came along...

Now that news of Horus's treachery is in the open, a time of testing has come. Some Legions have already declared their allegiance to the Warmaster, while the loyalty of others lies firmly with the Emperor. As Horus deploys his forces, loyalist Astartes learn that a massive Wordbearers fleet is heading to Ultramar, home of the Ultramarines. Unless they can intercept the fleet, and destroy the mighty battleship that has been sent to reinforce it, the Ultramarines may suffer a blow from which they will never recover.

As the granddaughter of a famed navigator, seventeen-year-old Reyna has always lived life on her own terms, despite those who say a girl could never be an explorer for the royal house of St. John del Mar. She is determined to prove them wrong, and as she returns home after a year-long expedition, she knows her dream is within reach. No longer an apprentice, instead: Reyna, Master Explorer.

But when menacing raiders attack her ship, those dreams are pushed aside. Reyna's escape is both desperate and dangerous, and when next she sees her ship, a mystery rises from the deep. The sailors--her captain, her countrymen--have vanished. To find them, Reyna must use every resource at her disposal... including placing her trust in a handsome prince from a rival kingdom.

Together they uncover a disturbing truth. The attack was no isolated incident. Troubling signs point to a shadowy kingdom in the north, and for once, the rulers of the Sea of Magdalen agree: something must be done. But can Reyna be brave enough to find a way?